Roger on Running: Running Revives a City

Reflections from Christchurch's International Track Meet

Will Leer leads Lee Emanuel and Nick Willis in the New Balance men's 2-mile handicap race on Feb. 4 in Christchurch.

The shot rose, curved down, and plunked into the grass. A big one. Silence. No one moved. All eyes were on the official with the two flags, one red, one white. A long pause. Then he raised the white flag. And 3,000 people around him burst into a huge triumphant cheer, filling the arena with acclaim.

“In a lifetime in track and field,” I said over the public address, as the crowd chortled, “I have never heard an official get a cheer like that.”

What did it mean?

It simple terms, it meant that after three out of his first four attempts got the red flag for foot faults, the brilliant young Jacko Gill had hit one right. He's the fresh-faced, big-boned New Zealand teenager who exploded from nowhere at age 15 to win the 2010 world junior championship for the shot put, displacing Usain Bolt as the youngest ever junior world champ.

On this day in Christchurch he was putting against (kind of) the towering, genial women's multiple world and Olympic champion Valerie Adams. All New Zealanders hope Gill will join Adams in shot put royalty, and 3,000 of them were sitting in attentive circles, right there on the grass around the shot area (at the invitation of Adams and the meet organizers) to watch the two perform.

Olympic champion Valerie Adams gave the Christchurch crowd exactly what it needed.

In less simple terms, the ebullient cheers for Gill (and the judge) meant that the people of Christchurch were determined to have a good time. They clapped in unison for Gill and Adams, they screamed wildly for Olympic 1500m silver medallist Nick Willis and the American friend who beat him, Will Leer, they whooped for the school relays, they even cheered the officials.

It was testimony to the resilient spirit of that poor earthquake-battered city that the Feb. 4 International Track Meet (ITM) was being held at all. A year ago this week — on Feb. 22, 2011 — the city fell, its track and field stadium was wrecked, 186 people were killed, including one prominent running coach, and the ITM scheduled four days later was inevitably canceled. [See Roger on Running, The Silver Lining of the Christchurch Quake, March 2011]. Since then, there have been more than 10,000 measurable aftershocks (that's more than one an hour, 24 hours a day, non-stop for a year), some the force of quite major quakes.

They have further damaged buildings, squeezed fetid grey liquefaction up from the earth into houses and streets, disrupted life, and put reconstruction on hold. Many people have left, schools share buildings, stores work from shipping containers, roads are rubble, ruined historic churches and modern multi-story hotels are being demolished, the cruise ships anchor in smoother harbors. Sports have struggled on as sports do, but the 2011 Rugby World Cup games planned for Christchurch were moved elsewhere, the unkindest cut of all.

Don't ask me to write without emotion about Christchurch. Early in my career, I lived happily there for six years, returned many times to race or as track announcer or university speaker, and this was my first return to the central city since the destruction of so many places that I knew and loved.

The city's people have declined to be traumatized. “We just want to get on with life,” one runner, who is about to become a father, told me. Under orders to carry key documents and his laptop whenever he leaves the office, he can no longer train by running to and from work as he used to. Every one adapts.

But they are starved of top-level sport. So the three running and track enthusiasts who created the ITM resolved, in spite of everything, to provide quality track and field again, and to stage it in central Christchurch, defy the quakes, not join the retreat to better facilities in safer cities. They found an atmospheric tree-lined grass cricket field where they could fit in a 300-something meter lap, in the English-style grounds of Christ's College, a private school only a half mile from the cordoned-off debris of the downtown. It was a courageous and inspired decision.

The grass was mowed to croquet-lawn perfection. The track was expertly surveyed. The announcer (me) was installed overlooking the track from the window of a third-floor classroom with Japanese phrases all over the blackboard. A nearby classroom block was a semi-ruin. Results came up to me by a bulldog clip on a long cord dangling out the window. This was not London's Olympic Stadium. But once Adams and Gill confirmed, glossy new concrete shot and discus circles were laid, precisely to IAAF specification.

And for the first time for many a decade, I saw crowds lining up for a track meet an hour before the gates opened.